The Tinker's Wedding; Riders to the Sea; And the Shadow of the Glen. by

The Tinker's Wedding is a two-act play by the Irish playwright J. M. Synge, whose main characters - as the title suggests - are Irish Tinkers. It is set on a roadside near a chapel in rural Ireland and premiered 11 November 1909. Plot synopsis: Sarah Casey convinces the reluctant Michael Byrne to marry her by threatening to run off with another man. She accosts a local priest, and convinces him to wed them for ten shillings and a tin can. Michael's mother shows up drunk and harasses the priest, then steals the can to exchange it for more drink. The next morning Sarah and Michael go to the chapel to be wed, but when the priest finds that the can is missing he refuses to perform the ceremony. Sarah protests and a fight breaks out that ends with the priest tied up in a sack. The tinkers free him after he swears not to set the police after them and he curses them in God's name as they flee in mock terror.... Riders to the Sea is a play written by Irish Literary Renaissance playwright John Millington Synge. It was first performed on 25 February 1904 at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin, by the Irish National Theater Society. A one-act tragedy, the play is set in the Aran Islands, Inishmaan, and like all of Synge's plays it is noted for capturing the poetic dialogue of rural Ireland. The plot is based not on the traditional conflict of human wills but on the hopeless struggle of a people against the impersonal but relentless cruelty of the sea. In 1897, J. M. Synge was encouraged by his friend and colleague William Butler Yeats to visit the Aran islands. He went on to spend the summers from 1898 to 1903 there. While on the Aran island of Inishmaan, Synge heard the story of a man from Inishmaan whose body washed up on the shore of the island of Donegal, which inspired Riders to the Sea. Riders to the Sea is written in the dialect of the Aran islands: Hyberno-English. (Synge's use of native Irish/Gaelic language is part of the Irish Literary Renaissance, a period when Irish literature looked to encourage pride and nationalism in Ireland.)....... In the Shadow of the Glen, also known as The Shadow of the Glen, is a one-act play written by the Irish playwright J. M. Synge and first performed at the Molesworth Hall, Dublin, on October 8, 1903. It was the first of Synge's plays to be performed on stage. It is set in an isolated cottage in County Wicklow in what was then the present day (c. 1903). PLOT: A tramp seeking shelter in the Burkes' isolated farmhouse finds Nora tending to the corpse of Dan. Nora goes out to find Michael, and Dan reveals to the tramp that his death is a mere ruse. He plays dead again when Nora and Michael return, but leaps up in protest when Michael proposes to Nora. Dan kicks Nora out to wander the roads and she leaves with the tramp, who promises her a life of freedom........ Edmund John Millington Synge (16 April 1871 - 24 March 1909) was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, travel writer and collector of folklore. He was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival and was one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for his play The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots in Dublin during its opening run at the Abbey Theatre. Although he came from a privileged Anglo-Irish background, Synge's writings are mainly concerned with the world of the Roman Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view. Synge developed Hodgkin's disease, a metastatic cancer that was then untreatable. He died several weeks short of his 38th birthday as he was trying to complete his last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows....